Interlaced magnetic recording (IMR) generally refers to the concept of utilizing trimmed tracks and non-trimmed tracks with one or more selected written track widths or one or more different linear densities for data writes to alternating data tracks on a storage medium. A trimmed track is a track trimmed by two adjacent tracks written at given track pitch, while a non-trimmed track is a track not trimmed by any adjacent track. In these systems, data may be read from or written to the data tracks in a non-consecutive order. For example, data may be written exclusively to a first track series including every other data track in a region of a storage medium before data is written to any data tracks interlaced between the tracks of the first series.
Shingled magnetic recording (SMR) generally refers to the concept of writing data tracks consecutively in a manner such that each consecutive data track is written on top of an edge of the previous data track. In these systems, guard tracks may be included that do not include any user data, which may reduce read/write processing time.